What is address munging?
Email address munging is the act of using ASCII, JavaScript, and scrambling of letters in your email address in order to hide your email address from spam bots, spiders, and spoofers. Our main page has a great email address munging tool.
What are spam bots?
Spam bots, also called spam spiders, are programs written to automatically search the web for email addresses. They pick up any email addresses they find in order to send them spam and junk mail.
What exactly is spam?
Spam is precisely defined as Unsolicited Commercial Email. Some people have "home spun" definitions. Mine is every annoying bit of email that I didn't ask for. I even include chain mail in my definition of spam.
Why does email address munging make my email address invisible to spam bots?
While the person viewing your page uses a browser, spam bots do not. They look directly at the source code for your page without ever looking at the display. Since they do not see an email address, they are not able to copy it and use it to spam you.
Why doesn't the spam bot just convert my email address back into the displayed format and copy that?
An extremely small amount actually do. The reason that most don't is that almost no one tries to mask and hide their email addresses from spam bots in any way. Also, those who are smart enough to mask their email address from spam bots don't use the same email address masking method. Even more, they tend to be smart enough not to click on spam. As a result, a bot, and specifically the person who wrote the bot's code, who even tried to find email addresses hidden in some specific format would not find very many. Since their goal is quantity, they usually do not search for email addresses munged this way.
What else can I do to prevent spam?
quickly. I can't emphasize this too strongly. Spam bots are only one way that spammers can get your email address. Another way is your unsafe browser accidentally downloading something ugly like spyware. Unsafe browsing, sometimes even through simple game sites, is the most common way spyware gets onto your computer. Spyware can be used to steal your email address and more, and do bad things with what it finds.
Firefox is free, it's more secure against spyware, and it's more secure against viruses. Firefox can even recognize sites that look like information stealing phishing sites for you.
Click the link to learn more about Firefox.
If your page is very simple and does not need very much professionalism, then don't make your email address an active link. This can help you avoid using the "mailto" handle and also the "@" symbol, two things spammers look for.
If you don't make your email address an active link, you can also make your email address displayed as something like
Dont click on links you shouldn't trust. Sometimes it's obvious, but sometimes it's not. Links that say Click here to make us your homepage are a great example of links you shouldn't trust. Another great example are links in spam. Sometimes people click on links just to see where they go. Don't do that.
Don't give your email address to sites you shouldn't trust. Some easy guidelines to tell if you shouldn't trust them are if you are or could be an instant winner, if you're getting a very insane and equally exclusive deal, or if you wouldn't let your child or grandmother go to the site.
Use multiple email addresses. I suggest using one especially for sites that ask for your email address that don't look trustworthy.
Don't forward chain letters. If you can, don't even read the chain letter. Also, try to avoid downloading image in a chain letter.
Chain mail is a classic way that spammers collect email addresses. Most of the time, chain mail will have a huge list of all the people, including their email addresses, that received the chain letter.
If you know the person who sent you the chain letter, politely ask them not to send them to you anymore. If you don't know the person, quickly delete the letter. Do not reply to the person who sent it to you.
Don't click on "unsubscribe" links in spam. I've seen a lot of reputable antispam sites advocating "unsubscribing" from spam email senders by clicking on "unsubscribe" links in the spam. Oh my, that is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. You didn't "subscribe" to begin with, and they still have your email address, right? Trying to unsubscribe from spam will just give them verification that your email address is real.
I've gotten some spam. What can I do now?
There are a lot of expensive software that claim to completely eliminate spam for you. Don't believe them.
Let's be clear. Once you get some spam, it means spammers have your email address. From then on, some spam is unavoidable, and the amount you get is is pot luck. Some spammers stop after a few days or weeks of spamming, while some don't. Some redistribute or sell email addresses, while some don't. Some send thousands of spam emails, while some send billions.
Even still, there are things that you can do to reduce spam and prevent future spam.
The best spams to do this with are spam that contain a URL. If it does, don't click on the URL, but go to whois.com and find who the owner of that site is.
spamcop.net has a good tool to automate this process.
I personally don't like these, because not all machine-generated emails are spam. For me, actually, well over 90% of the email I receive on my non-addressmunger.com account is machine-generated. Challenge-Response systems makes it difficult to manage these sites.
The idea behind these is that the spammer will receive these and remove your email address from their lists. This can obviously be risky, since some spammers take replies and always assume they are real. It's up to you if you want to try this, and we repeat that we don't recommend it.
Where did the name "Spam" come from?
(Source) This is a tricky one. No one knows exactly. The food SPAM (all letters capitalized) is created by Hormel Foods. It is believed by many that the name for Email Spam came from a Monty Python sketch on SPAM.
The first ever known spam was sent through Arpanet by a DEC marketing rep. (Arpanet is one of those things that came before "the internet".)
The term Spam became popular when many abusive users who frequented BBSs and MUDs would either repeatedly repeat the word SPAM or quote lines from the Monty Python sketch in order to scroll posts from the screen.
The first mass spammers were lawyers Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, who used Usenet to advertise immigration law services, now known as Green Card Spam. They then promoted spamming of Usenet and email as a new means of advertising.
How do I hide my webpage from search engines?
First, be extremely sure that that's what you really want to do. If it is, paste some or all of the following meta tags into your page header:
Note: No one knows how permanent these tags are. If you put these on your site and decide to remove them later, I don't know how long it will be until search engines reindex your site.
Are there any differerences between an email address munger, an email address encoder, and an email address encrypter?
Or mailto encoder, email address obfuscator, or email address disguiser, hider, masker, cloaker, distorter, concealer .... Absolutely nothing. Sometimes people might call one an email munger, email encoder, email encrypter, email obfuscator, etc. But these names (without the word "address" in them) might refer to the encoding of an actual email to be sent, versus the munging of the email address to be posted on a webpage.
Some people don't say "munge" (like "lunge"), they say "mung" (like "hung"). I actually looked up both words, and they both work. I even looked up some of the history of the words, and it's not clear which came first. We say "munge". Why? I don't know.
How can I tell others about your site?
We are also in desparate need of human translators. (No computerized translations please.) If you would like to volunteer to be a translator, Contact us at .
I have a question, comment, or suggestion not covered above. How can I contact you?
Contact us at .